Echoenergia innovates in electric sector with CenturyLink on its journey to AWS cloud

SAO PAULO, Mar. 19, 2018 – Echoenergia, a company that implements and operates projects to generate electricity from renewable sources, took an innovative step by utilizing a cloud environment provided by CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE:CTL, news, filings) to manage the company's operations in Brazil.

Challenge:

Founded at the beginning of 2017, Echoenergia experienced rapid growth throughout the year. The company managed two wind farms at the beginning of May, but by December, the company had six stations, which added up to 70 employees and generated up to 476 MW (megawatts).

This accelerated growth brought challenges. Headquartered in São Paulo, Echoenergia needed access and the ability to remotely monitor and control the activities of its wind farms in the states of Pernambuco, Ceara, Rio Grande do Norte and Bahia to maintain the company’s efficiency and quality standards. The company needed a secure and stable online environment, since in the electricity sector, a few seconds of downtime could reflect delays, losses and fines.

Due to the challenges of the sector's ecosystem, such as respecting the rules of the National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL), Echoenergia bet on innovation and sought a cloud environment, as implementation time was a key success factor.

Solution:

Echoenergia defined five pillars for its IT department. “Cloud-first” was the first pillar established, giving shape to a strategy that also prioritizes the other four pillars: information security, friendly and intuitive environment, high availability and cost effectiveness to set up an environment that can solve demands quickly.

Echoenergia chose the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment for its range of solutions available in the cloud. Even with all the infastructure in place, there was a need for a partner to help implement all the project design requirements into a feasible technical solution.

“I trusted CenturyLink because I knew they could deliver the best result for our connectivity challenges”, commented André Spina, Echoenergia´s TI Manager. “CenturyLink was present from the beginning of the process, listening to all our demands and presenting options. Other companies in our industry are already interested in understanding the solution that we implemented, a fact that is interesting both from a safety and quality point of view.”

CenturyLink, faced with the challenge of customizing and managing the entire cloud solution, relied on its team of experts to design and deploy the solution required by Echoenergia. Using the AWS Public Cloud platform, the entire solution was activated in fewer than 15 days, with all the necessary adjustments to the stability and security of the environment. The rapid process brought almost immediate gains, breaking some paradigms such as geographical location and data storage security, allowing the Operations Center to supervise the procedures of wind farms installed in the Northeast of Brazil, and also obtain productive data from the activities recorded in the cloud.

“The use of public cloud platforms allows us to extend the reach of our solutions and optimize administrative times and processes for our customers,” states André Magno, Data Center and Security Director from CenturyLink Brazil. “With these options, CenturyLink – aside from being a traditional data center provider through our own facilities – presents itself as a true broker of technological solutions, seeking the best of each technology in projects oriented to the specific needs of our customers.”

Key Facts about CenturyLink:

CenturyLink has worked with Echoenergia since the beginning of 2017, providing communication solutions such as dedicated internet access and voice.
In 2017, CenturyLink completed Level 3´s acquisition.
CenturyLink's global fiber-optic network stretches for more than 720,000 kilometers (450,000 miles), serves customers in more than 60 countries.
CenturyLink’s global IP backbone capacity is more than 43 terabits per second (Tbps).
CenturyLink has more than 100,000 on-net buildings worldwide.
CenturyLink operates 17 data centers in Latin America and more than 360 worldwide.
CenturyLink’s data centers host both the company’s own and customers’ IT environments, and are managed on-site by a team of specialized technicians.
About CenturyLink

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is the second largest U.S. communications provider to global enterprise customers. With customers in more than 60 countries and an intense focus on the customer experience, CenturyLink strives to be the world’s best networking company by solving customers’ increased demand for reliable and secure connections. The company also serves as its customers’ trusted partner, helping them manage increased network and IT complexity and providing managed network and cyber security solutions that help protect their business.